On 2013-02-12 21:44, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
On Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:40:38 -0500 Ned Batchelder
wrote: But the only reason "".join() is a Python idiom in the first place is because it was "the fast way" to do what everyone initially coded as "s += ...". Just because we all learned a long time ago that joining was the fast way to build a string doesn't mean that "".join() is the clean idiomatic way to do it.
It's idiomatic because strings are immutable (by design, not because of an optimization detail) and therefore concatenation *has* to imply building a new string from scratch.
Tuples are much like immutable lists; sets were added, and then frozensets; should we be adding mutable strings too (a bit like C#'s StringBuilder)? (Just wondering...)